HackMIT, which with 900 participants was among the largest hackathons in the country this year, was prompted to investigate the possibility that Seamless had cheated when other participants pointed out that the demo videos they presented as their results were identical to those published by Microsoft Research.

“They did implement everything they said, but going over it there was some confusion as to what kind of results they actually got,” said Siegel. “It was difficult to see if their implementation was correct, so they agreed to voluntarily step down.” Her statement seemed at odds with a HackMIT blog post that said the organization “disqualified” two projects.

The videos presented onstage were taken from the Microsoft researchers’ webpage, Siegel said, though she added that the Seamless team only “used them in the context of showing the power of the algorithm.”

However, Siegel still maintains that Seamless wasn’t explicitly found guilty of any cheating. “Basically, Seamless chose to step down rather than going through the process of proving their code worked,” Siegel said. “I want to make it very clear that they weren’t incriminated or found guilty of anything.”

While that may be true— one can say that about any book on computer science. And that's not true for every comp sci book. Not saying this is anywhere near any of the classics, but I at least want to give it a chance.

I just ordered MLAPP :-) I was looking for something besides a textbook, because they can be so dense, however this is dense material. If this suffices then I'll definitely cancel my pre-order. What I am hoping for is Bengio's Deep Learning book to come out.

Why should I not pre-order? I've read many o'reilly media books that I believe we're first publications. I think at least. I'm sure it has been edited and corrected. It is also a fundamentals book— just trying to brush up on the basics.

Nothing. I doubt it is going to sell out. There's actually a disadvantage as I don't get to use their 3 for 2 sale. But I wanted to devote money to it now. It will be a nice gift to myself in the future.